


Time Theft

by minorin



Category: Life Is Strange 2 (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Happy Ending, Redemption
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-08
Updated: 2020-12-08
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:02:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27955088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/minorin/pseuds/minorin
Summary: How Sean spent the fifteen years in prison and how Daniel helped him along the way.Based on Redemption with a slightly altered ending. Sean went to live with Daniel after his imprisonment ended.
Relationships: Daniel Diaz & Sean Diaz
Comments: 4
Kudos: 15





	Time Theft

Sean spent his seventeenth birthday in prison.  
On 15 August, during his first-ever visiting hour, Daniel went to see him, together with Karen, Claire and Stephen. They could only talk to him through a thick wall of glass without any body contact by principle, but the guards allowed them in since that was the first time and it was Sean’s birthday.  
That was enough a gift for Sean, although Daniel seemed rather frustrated.  
“I wanted to make you a birthday cake because I don’t have time to look for a gift, but they told me food is not allowed.”  
Then Daniel burst into tears. Much to Sean’s relief, there was no object floating when he cried.  
They still needed to spend nearly the entire time trying to comfort him though.  
The boy only stopped crying when Sean promised him they would spend birthdays and bake some cakes together after he was out.  
Only that he knew how frail promises are.

+++

Sean’s roommate Mike was a bearded man with a gold front tooth, much like a muscle-bound version of Brody. He would grin at him, showing his gold tooth ostentatiously, and made jokes on their pirate-like appearances.  
There were also other unfriendly guys who later picked on him. Sean managed to hit back, with the help of his roommate. Overall, his prison life was not a total mess. Especially since he’s still got Daniel.

+++

Daniel brought some colouring markers and a new sketchbook for his second visit.  
The sketchbook and markers had gone through several safety checks, Sean could tell from the strangely reassembled binding and the slightly leaking ink.   
“I wanted to bring you coloured pencils, but pencil-sharpeners are not allowed either so,” Daniel told him.  
Sean didn’t expect the gift. He was not used to marker but was more than happy to receive such a present. He missed having a proper drawing set.  
“Exactly what I need! Man, do you have telepathy or something?”  
“Yeah, of course I do.”  
Daniel answered somehow proudly, and they both chuckled.  
The prison guard placed a glance at them for the noise but finally looked away with indifference.

+++

“Sean, you know, I could just-”  
Daniel stretched his hand out and clenched his fist. Nothing happened, but Sean for a moment was scared.   
“No! No. Don’t.”  
Sean knew he looked miserable in his current appearance. He was involved in some fight two days ago, unintentionally though, and got a bruised chin. He could tell Daniel felt guilty. About his wounds, the short visiting hours, even this whole unrighteous punishment.  
He didn’t want Daniel to feel this way. He wanted him to live in safety and happiness, not guilt and regret.  
Sean searched his brain for a proper topic to get them out of the current situation, and an idea idly passed his mind.  
“Hey Daniel, do you remember the time when we escaped from that weird bear guy at that gas station?”  
“That freaking Hank Stamper?”  
The teen’s attention was successfully averted.  
So Sean continued.  
“Actually I’m trying to create a comic. About Superwolf. So I was thinking maybe I could use some of these events in the storyline.”  
“Cool! Can I read it?”  
“I haven’t started it yet! Jeez, you really should learn to be patient.”  
“How can I be patient enough to wait for the coolest comic in the world!”  
Daniel’s excitement was almost contagious. Sean found himself a little light-hearted, surprisingly. He hadn’t been feeling this way for so long.   
“What happened to Hawt Dawg Man then? Is it not the coolest anymore?”  
Daniel’s brows furrowed as if he was really struggling to make a choice. And finally, he settled on some compromise.  
“Then Superwolf is the coolest, but only if you let me read it first!”  
“OK. Deal.”

Coming out all from a whim, creating a comic turned out to be an excellent recreation for Sean to waste time in the prison. And Superwolf the comic even earned him some money. Stephen and Daniel helped him set up a bank account to manage his income, although Sean never bothered to know the exact number of it.

+++

During the years, people came to visit him.  
Daniel, and Claire and Stephen, and sometimes even Chris and Charles. Lyla. Karen. Jacob and his sister. The other members of the wanderers came once or twice, despite their intrinsic antipathy towards the place.   
But then Lyla went to college and only came back to Seattle during vacations. Stephen had some leg problems and could only come every five or six months. Karen, however, appeared randomly, which Sean somehow had foreseen. She still came and Sean appreciated that a lot though.   
In the end, only Daniel stayed.   
He grew up, like any boy does, but his presence was never enough to fill the empty room cut off by the glass.

+++

And even Daniel was not always punctual.

Sean waited.  
Daniel was not here yet. Sometimes he would be late, due to a late train, or some procedures he must go through before entering this room, yet he would sit in front of him eventually. Just not this time, it seems.  
Towards the end of the visiting hour, he stood up and slapped the glass, and called out, “Daniel! Daniel!”  
But Daniel never showed up and the prison guard acted quickly to make him kneel down on the floor.   
Sean spent the next week in solitary confinement.   
At first he was angry. He tried to draw something under the dim light, only to find himself not able to focus at all, and tore the whole page of the sketchbook off and ripped it into pieces. Then he got frightened because it might be that something happened. Something that he was always scared of. Maybe they find out about Daniel’s gift and lock him up. Or something bad, like the time when Daniel got seriously sick.   
He was too worried to the point he became mad, with all horrible images sneaking into his head.   
Fortunately, the next visiting session, Daniel was right back there. He looked just fine, without any traces of wound or sickness, which put Sean’s heart back into place.   
Daniel apologised right when he picked up the walkie-talkie.  
“Sorry Sean, I had to stay in the hospital for the whole weekend. It was an accident.”  
Concern and panic pricked Sean’s heart as the words overlapping with his nightmare.  
“Did you… did you get hurt?”  
“I’m OK! It’s just they asked me to stay in the hospital for another couple of hours to see there is bleeding in my brain or something. Turned out I’m a hundred percent healthy.”  
Then Sean started to worry about maybe his power was exposed. He didn’t say it out loud but Daniel clearly got his message and assured him.  
“And did others know…?”  
“Nuh, everything is fine.”  
It was after that did they start to talk about the accident itself.  
“…And the school bus was miraculously stopped before rushing down into the lake!”  
The two exchanged a tacit look.  
“That’s really some miracle. Wonder how this was possible.”  
“It must be Superwolf! He definitely saved the day.”  
“Yeah yeah.”

Sean spent the next several days on the Superwolf comic. This time he was able to draw at least.

+++

Remaining jail time and crimes committed were part of the prison courtesy, but Sean never answered when asked about his misdeed. He said nary a word on that fucking court, so he would say nary a word in this fucking jail.  
Sometimes the urge to spill everything out, to say that he’s innocent burned him from inside. He had kept the lie a secret for so long that he began to believe it. To believe that he is guilty, that he deserves years of confinement.  
And he felt gradually torn apart.  
Half of him wanted Daniel to be stuck here with him forever and go through everything he had been through. He was punished for the crimes he never committed and he needed someone to share his pain so deadly.  
The other half of him, however, would appear whenever these dark thoughts were about to drown him. And this part of him spoke to Daniel, “You should live your own life. You don’t have to spend hours travelling though states just to come for every visiting session.”  
“But you are part of my life, Sean.”  
Daniel said, his voice tangled in static but still clear and firm.

+++

Sean would get a calendar from Daniel and Claire and Stephen every year towards the end of the current year. He used to count days passed with them. First he drew circles but found that the number stuck in a closed line would trigger him off. Then he simply scratched the day off, from the calendar and hopefully from his mind. Three years later, he stopped looking at calendars at all. And even watches, or anything that is related to time.  
What’s the point to expect another day when all the days are the same?  
Thus the calendars were left rotten under his iron bed, just like the time frozen underneath the printed pages. 

+++

Daniel hesitated on whether to ask Sean to live with him after he got out. He just moved out from his apartment and found himself a house back in Seattle. 

“Why not?”  
Chris’s voice sounded a little distant through the phone. During the years Daniel never got used to talking to people using some gadget. He kept fidgeting a piece of wood scrapped from the oak tree, and couldn’t find an answer until seconds later.  
“Because… because he may not want to.”  
“That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ask.”  
“Then how do I ask?”  
“Simple! ‘Do you want to live with me at my place after you get out?’ And ta-da, mission accomplished.”  
“That sounds too casual.”  
“Oh man. You really are too nervous about this. He’s your big brother you know? Plus you go to visit him like, every other day! You don’t have to be formal. It’s not like you’re proposing-”  
“It’s every two weeks actually and, shut up!”  
Daniel retorted, but Chris laughed and assured him with strong confidence.  
“Don’t worry! You still got, like, a few months, to figure things out. You two will be fine. Believe me.”

+++

Most of Sean’s prison friends were not so enthusiastic about the visiting hours, scared of sitting in front of the glass for the whole half hour with nobody coming to visit them at all. Not Sean though. The only problem is that he found it more and more difficult to follow the conversation while Daniel always had a lot of things to say.   
“…We don’t even need cash or credit cards anymore. You can pay with your phone. Man, you should definitely check what these electronic devices nowadays can do.”  
And in some ten or twenty seconds Sean didn’t reply. He couldn’t.  
He could tell Daniel hated the sudden silence coming from him, which was taking place more and more often. He tried to act normal, at least not so clumsy and at least in front of his brother, but the task seemed increasingly hard.  
Another ten seconds passed, and finally, Sean found some response.  
“Seems like I have a lot of homework to do to catch up after I-”  
“-after you get out, do you want to come live with me?”  
The proposition came from nowhere, and even Daniel himself seemed surprised after blurting it out.  
Sean blinked. Once. Twice and thrice.  
So Daniel continued, “I just moved out from my old apartment to a new house and the house is quite roomy so I think maybe you can come live with me then you don’t have to find a place yourself and if you don’t want to that’s OK but you can still stay there for a while before you find your own house and-”  
He had to stop to retrieve his breath, and Sean used the chance to cut in, before another lengthy reasoning.  
“I’m glad to.”  
“-and… Wait, what? Really?”  
“I’m glad to live with you after I’m out. It’d be great,” Sean repeated himself, with all the patience and calm in the world.

+++

The rest of his prison life was spent in expectation and uncertainty.  
Sean knew people in the prison that came back from time to time because they couldn’t adapt themselves to the outside world and could only find peace in places like jails.  
He just hoped that he could do better.

+++

Numbness followed him like a ghost as Sean walked away from the heavy metal bars, out of the grey gate, into the car. Even when he stepped into the house, everything still seemed unreal as if he was again looking them through some bullet-proof glass.  
Karen was back to her motel and they were only two when finally reaching Daniel’s house.  
The house was much like the one they had been living in before. From outside it didn’t look that big but once entering, the spaciousness was incredible, although it could be because there was only one person living in it at the time.  
Daniel probably did some housework and rearrangement before going out to get him. The living room was all clean and almost everything was in order, except for a game controller on the floor standing out of the tidiness.  
It took Sean some time to find the other brand-new controller which was lying just near the PlayBox. He wandered towards the controller on the floor to pick it up. The game consoles didn’t seem to change that much since the last time he saw it.  
“It doesn’t change that much, right?”  
Daniel’s voice came from behind the couch. Sean turned his head to find Daniel grinning at him. There were times like this when Sean doubted his little brother actually had the ability to read minds.  
“I hope there are new games to play though,” Sean said, placing the controller back to where it should be.  
It was then he found the game collection underneath the TV.  
“Wow. Someone’s got a library in the house.”  
“Yeah. But single-player mode is no fun.”  
Daniel walked to him, stopped at his side, and picked up the new controller. He handed it to Sean and asked expectantly.  
“Will you join me playing?”  
Suddenly, Sean was sixteen again. Dad and Daniel were sitting cross-legged on the couch, eyes fixing on the TV screen. While playing, they forgot about the world surrounding them, including Sean. It didn’t matter though, because he was busy catching the moment with his sketch.  
Sean took the controller. He wanted to say something, but nothing was forming in his head struck by the memory.  
For a moment neither of them uttered a word, and only the ticking of the clock filled into the blankness.  
In the end, it’s Daniel who broke the silence.  
“Do you remember that old watch? Back then I wanted your time so badly that I stole your watch.”  
Sean remembered, of course.  
“Then I end up stealing another fifteen years from you.”  
Daniel continued. The saddened smile easily touched the softest part of Sean’s heart.  
He would never know what would happen if they made different decisions, but he didn’t regret his choice and he was so proud of the man that little wolf had become.  
“It’s not- It’s not like that.”  
Sean stuttered a little, struggling to find the proper words.  
It’s not stealing, not when I willingly give them to you.   
Then Daniel reached out his arms and pulled his big brother into a hug, gently but tightly. He patted on Sean’s back like Sean did back when he had nightmares.  
Slowly, the numbness started to melt. Into tears probably, because meanwhile, Sean found tears were running down his face. And along with the melting numbness, the frozen time within him began to crack like thin ice in late spring days.  
Everything will be fine, he thought, and finally started to believe it.  
Because he’s home.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!  
> Redemption just hurts too much... I wish it could end differently so I wrote my version of this ending down. This is actually my first LIS2 fic and my first fic written in English and I really hope you enjoyed it. Please let me know if there is any typo or mistake or if you have any thoughts after reading the fic!


End file.
